This program of research focuses on essential memory skills involved in disregarding irrelevant information in memory. These skills are important since the failure to ignore irrelevant information in memory may reduce the capacity available to process relevant information, and learning efficiency will decrease. These skills are studied in both mentally retarded and normal children. The research will provide careful, detailed analyses of problem-solving strategies used to disregard irrelevant information in memory and develop and evaluate preliminary training and remediation procedures for these basic skills. Data will be placed within the information processing deficit approach to mental retardation with specific reference to a memory model developed for this type of task. Strategies will be studied in a sequential memory task in which, periodically, the child is instructed to forget information which he was previously instructed to remember. The ten experiments will fall into one of three categories: (1) methodological studies of essential strategies; (2) experiments focusing on specific questions concerning the cognitive skills necessary for this task and assessing the effects of strategy training on these skills and (3) studies devoted to questions related to training and remediation of these cognitive skills. This project will provide specific information about a set of essential cognitive processes within a well defined theoretical framework and will give an indication of how deficiencies on these cognitive skills can be remediated.